Photo(genic) finish

 Look, don't come at me with tradition, this fine May morning. I'm all about tradition, at least as it applies to that auto race they put on in Indianapolis every Memorial Day weekend.

I would, for instance, be the first to boo lustily if they decided all that spilled milk in Victory Lane was wasteful ("Starving children in China would be glad to have this!" I hear Ralphie's mom scolding in "A Christmas Story"), and offensive to the lactose intolerant, besides.

I'd yelp "The hell is THIS??" if they decided, ah, 30 cars are enough for one race.

And I'd lead the march on Doug Boles's office if they decided to pave over the yard of brick because, you know, it just doesn't work esthetically surrounded by all that asphalt.

That said ...

That said, I had zero problem with the way the 106th Indianapolis 500 finished up yesterday.

How it finished up was, they let 'em race to the checkers, which is the way something called a "race" should finish up. When the wall off Turn 2 bit Jimmie Johnson with four laps to run, it didn't bring out the yellow. It brought out the red -- as in, "Everyone back to the pits until we can clean up the mess and finish the 500 the way the 500 should finish."

And, no, that's not in the IndyCar rulebook, officially. And it's not consistent, seeing how they wouldn't do that in the same situation anywhere else on the IndyCar circuit. And, yeah, it wiped out Marcus Ericsson's three-second lead, and that seemed a trifle unfair.

But you know what?

A finish under caution would have been a trifle unfair, too. And mainly that's because the mass of humanity who turned the Indianapolis Motor Speedway into an insta-city of 300,000 weren't anywhere else on the IndyCar circuit.

They were at Indy -- full name, the Indianapolis 500, which means it deserved to be the Indianapolis 500 and not the Indianapolis-490-And-Then-Grandma-Drives-Her-Buick-To-The-Grocery-Store-10. 

So they parked 'em, and cleaned off the track, and raced to the end. Ericsson staved off a charging Pato O'Ward by snake-dancing around the place to keep Pato off his air, and outdragged him to turn one when Pato took his shot with a lap to run. 

The result: The 500 got the photo(genic) finish it deserved. As did Ericsson, for that matter.

He hung around in the top five all day and hit the pit window just right, and avoided the mistakes and bad luck that took out the frontrunners, Scott Dixon and Alex Palou. It was an impeccable performance, and A Grandma-Drives-Her-Buick finish would have dimmed its luster a tad. 

Says here, anyway.